inside the whale and outside context problems' m. nick hubble, … · 2016-07-28 ·...
TRANSCRIPT
'Inside the Whale and Outside Context Problems'
Robert Duggan
University of Central Lancashire
accepted for The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks Nick Hubble, Ether
MacCallum-Stewart and Joe Norman (eds.) Gylphi (forthcoming 2017)
Iain M. Bank.s' s Culture series has achieved immense popularity with readers around
the world and in the eyes of many science fiction critics was part of a broader renewal
of the possibilities of space opera, an often disregarded and devalued area of
contemporary literature and perhaps even of scholarship on sf. Along the way this
collection of works has raised both fascinating political questions and the standard of
what readers might expect of the genre, combining as it does imaginative energy,
linguistic exuberance and a good deal of humour along with the galaxy-spanning
adventures. The non-linear series was also notable for its capacity to generate
compelling new stories while simultaneously deepening its engagement with the
complexities of the Culture as a civilisation. The contention of this article is that
Bank.s 's 1996 novel Excess ion marks a key stage in the literary development of the
Culture as a fictional social formation, one that demonstrates the newly-expanded
possibilities of space opera to explore and extend fundamental aspects of sf. This
entails a re-examination of the novel's complex handling of spatiality and
inside/outside and political dimensions of Bank.s' s writing.
There are a number of reasons why Excess ion might merit particular attention
in scholarly approaches to Bank.s' s sf: the novel was something of a return to the
Culture after sf novels Against a Dark Background (published in 1993, although
reworked from a version written in the 1970s) and Feersum Enjinn (1994) the winner
of the British Science Fiction Association Award. Another reason is that Culture
novels generally stage encounters in which the Culture is markedly more powerful
than the groups it meets; as Patricia Kerslake puts it in her book Science Fiction and
Empire (2007) "In almost all cases these other societies are less technologically
advanced ... " ( 17 6). This oeuvre context has meant that Excess ion has been a
significant reference point in a number of debates, such as those set out by Chris
Brown (2001) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and James Heilman (2008), around how
far the Culture as a totality might be regarded politically, especially in its actions
towards other species and societies. Even the fearsome Idirans in the first published
Culture novel Consider Phlebas (1987) soon discover they cannot match the Culture's
military power. In Excession however the Culture encounters an entity, the Excession,
capable of manipulating space-time in ways far beyond the comprehension of the
stunned ships who witness it.
So Excession arguably inaugurates a movement within the Culture novels
toward the Culture being revealed as a smaller, younger and less powerful civilisation
than hitherto suspected either by the Culture's humanoid and AI members or, just as
significantly, by the books' readers. My purpose here is to consider how we might
read this 'turn' in terms of genre and politics, and to situate it within the wider
contexts of both the Culture as a fictional project and Banks' s relation to his political
and historical milieu. While other Culture novels have inspired productive political
readings connecting Banks 's work to his historical situation, including the Gulf War
(Duggan, 2007), 9/11 (Stephenson) or the West Bank (Duggan, 2013), Excession
offers us a very detailed picture of how we might understand the Culture by placing it
in a unfamilair context of relative scientific ignorance. The kind of reading I am
proposing draws on the sensitive spatial analysis of sf conducted in Fredric Jameson' s
Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and builds on the work of James Kneale (2013)
who draws attention to the "geographical imagination" (45) evident in Banks' s
fiction. In the light of these insights, I will examine how Excess ion handles the
distinction between inside and outside, how it returns to the idea of being enfolded
within something, and the philosophical, political and somatic qualities of such
enfolding.
Excession was published not long after the appearance of ' A Few Notes on the
Culture' (1994a), Banks' s comprehensive essay on the Culture's workings and
systems that is such a useful resource to his readers, and I think we can trace
important continuities between the novel and the essay, so that we might read
Excess ion as staging in a dramatic, literary way many of the significant points made
about the Culture in 'A Few Notes' . This novel may be the literary expression of the
Culture that is closest to the descriptive one outlined in 'A Few Notes', therefore
offering a mature reflection on what the Culture had grown into as a creative project
spanning many years of writing. This sense that Excession might express the core of
what the Culture is and does also figures in Farah Mendlesohn's perceptive evaluation
of Excession in A Companion to Science Fiction (2005), where she makes a claim for
the novel's centrality to Banks' s oeuvre:
While there are other novels that compete for the title of best Culture novel
(Use of Weapons may be the most politically sophisticated, and its structure
the most impressive), Excession epitomizes much of what I have outlined
above. It is the most classic, the most archetypal in its revisioning of space
opera; the most ambitious in its portrayal of a complex political society; and
the most successful in its linguistic display and reconfiguration of the space
opera baroque and in the immersive techniques of extrapolative fiction.
(Mendlesohn 2005: 557-8)
Excess ion thus forms an archetype of what Banks ' s brand ofreengineered space opera
will offer, and its ambition on several fronts is palpable. Mendlesohn conveys the
substantial nature of the book as a literary achievement and in her outline of the novel
quoted above there are a number of points that might be elaborated on at greater
length. The first of these is her use of the term 'classic', which she goes on to develop
in relation to a faith in humanity's future among the stars that she identifies in
Banks's work and that has been a longstanding feature of space opera. Excession
however may be ' classic ' in other ways too, and Fredric Jameson 's discussion of
Vonda Mcintyre's 1975 post-apocalyptic novel The Exile in Waiting offers one such
avenue of inquiry. In a chapter entitled ' Science fiction as a spatial genre', Jameson
conducts a meticulous examination of Mcintyre' s use of space in the novel and how
the varying manipulations of spatiality in the narrative may point to a fundamental
quality of all sf:
If, as I believe, all SF of the more "classical" type is "about" containment,
closure, the dialectic of inside and outside, then the generic distinction
between those texts and others that have come to be called "fantasy"[ ... ] will
also be a spatial one, in which these last are seen as open-air meadow texts of
various kinds. (Jameson 2005: 312)
Jameson's argument that classic sf proceeds from a profound preoccupation with
containment and inside/outside is particularly pertinent to Excession' s treatment of
the limits of the Culture's collective power and knowledge, and the attempts of its
Minds to think outside their habitual terms of reference. Delight in the expansion and
decline of galactic empires has a been staple of space opera for decades, and as Ken
McLeod has noted, the parabolic quality of such fictional empires offers food for
thought when reflecting on the transformation of polities.i Which is to say that a
corollary to Excession' s classic-ness may be its sustained engagement and self
conscious play with inside/outside as a constitutive element of its generic identity.
Excession
Excession's Prologue introduces the reader to Dajeil Gelian, a woman in the
fortieth year of her pregnancy who lives aboard a ship which we learn is the enigmatic
Culture vessel Sleeper Service. The narrative will by instalments reveal the
motivation behind the delaying of her child's birth, and her relationship with Byr
Genar-Hofoen, a Culture ambassador among the sadistically-inclined species the
Affront. Chapter One however switches focus from this human-scale story to the
appearance of a strange object in a little visited part of the galaxy, that having come to
the attention of the Elencher spaceship Peace Makes Plenty now seems to be
destroying it with astonishing speed. By the time a group of Culture ships have
decided to investigate this unusual appearance, the Elencher craft has disappeared and
their quarry has taken a motionless, uncommunicative position that only increases the
mystery. This entity or machine has connections to the energy grid that the Culture
has never seen before and had long considered impossible, and so becomes an object
of intense fascination. The artefact becomes the focus of a secret plot to foment war
between the Culture and the Affront, a generally cruel species and one of Banks's
more consistently repellent groups, and the novel devotes a lot of space to
communication between ship Minds, as opposed to humans and droids. The obscure
object of scientific interest is what the culture calls an excession:
Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a
pejorative term and so the Elench didn't use it normally, except sometimes
informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively
aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. (Banks
1996:93)
The excessive qualities described here are quite negative ones, and the term itself is
explicitly identified as 'pejorative', suggesting a clear normative social order
threatened by (antisocial) excess of different kinds, by something external to that
order. This fairly simple initial definition of an excession however, with its emphasis
on aggression, power and expansionism, will give way to an experience that is far
more challenging for the Culture and that leads to critical self-analysis and a re
examination of the Culture' s sense of itself and its place in the universe.
The Excession, through its excessive relation to the Culture's model of the
universe, is therefore an Outside Context Problem, as the novel explains:
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations
encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same
way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate
an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish,
fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever,
the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you
were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity
you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which
your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation
was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass ... when suddenly this
bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these
guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've
just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on
presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with
your priests.(Banks 1996: 71-2) [ellipsis in original]
Having brought the full-stop to the reader' s attention as a marker of destructive
closure and potential extinction at the beginning of the section, Banks then playfully
extends the following sentence far beyond his typical length. The colonial analogy
used is surprisingly terrestrial and is based on a significant technological gap, but
perhaps more importantly hints at the problem of the outside context itself; the sudden
awareness that an outside context about which one knows nothing even exists at all is
part of the shock of the disorientating encounter. The specifically territorial aspect of
this archetypal imperial encounter (which perhaps owes a little to Banks' s experience
of Sid Meir's computer game Civilization;;), is crucial, and part of a broader pattern of
spatial argument and metaphor within the novel. The moment of colonial encounter
centres on geographical exploration coupled with political domination and economic
exploitation and includes the 'civilising mission' of challenging 'native' ways of life.
The charge of cannibalism was historically a useful plank in the rhetorical
justification of the ' pacification' of resisting groups. However, as Marina Warner
argues:
That imagery of forbidden ingestion masked other powerful longings and
fears - about mingling and hybridity, about losing definition, about
swallowing and being swallowed - fears about a future loss of identity, about
the changes that history itself brings. (Warner 1994: np)
W amer here draws attention to the potential pleasures and desires, as well as the
anxieties, around ingestion and incorporation. Indeed the long discourse around
cannibalism during the nineteenth century can be seen as an almost perverse reversal
of the forced incorporation of independent territories and peoples into a European
imperial context. More recently, the South African-set sf film District 9 (Blomkamp
2009) deploys the motif of cannibalism, most blatantly in the figure of the Nigerian
gangster boss in the aliens' camp who threatens to eat the protagonist to gain his
power. However the film also requires the viewer to ask how far the South African
authorities, with their keen interest in the protagonist' s physical metamophosis and
his consequent ability to use alien technology, are different to the gangster boss in
their desire to ' incoporate' alien weapons and power into their military-industrial
complex. As I will go on to show, Excession has a sustained focus on the experience
of entities at the borders of (in)corporality.
The potential reversability of host/invader, civilised/savage roles was apparent
early on in the Culture series and is at its most prominent in The Player of Games
(1989, first published 1988) in which the Culture protagonist Gurgeh seeks to win the
game of Azad and end the regime' s hegemony:
Empires had fallen to barbarians before, and no doubt would again. Gurgeh
knew all this from his childhood. Culture children were taught such things.
The barbarians invade, and are taken over. Not always; some empires
dissolve and cease, but many absorb; many take the barbarians in and end up
conquering them. They make them live like the people they set out to take
over. The architecture of the system channels them, beguiles them, seduces
and transforms them, demanding from them what they could not before have
given but slowly grow to offer. The empire survives, the barbarians survive,
but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
(Banks 1999: 276)
This narrative of mutual transformation is placed in opposition to a conventional one
of victory in colonial conquest or defeat at the hand of invaders, and offers a more
complex account of historical change. Whereas the Culture (and its readers) has been
accustomed to it occupying the position, if not exactly performing the role, of the
powerful imperium, in Excession it is placed, perhaps for the first time, in the position
of the ignorant barbarian. The colonial aspect to the encounter with the Ex cession is
developed throughout the novel and is reinforced further near the end when the
Culture ship Fate Amenable to Change contemplates its new status:
Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and
suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with
explosives or electricity. (Banks 1996: 386)
Banks, who has in interview described the Minds when faced with the Excession as
responding like 'barbarian kings presented with the promise of gold in the hills'
(Brown 2001: 633), here presents the emotional shock technological gaps can inflict
and the reader is invited to marvel at the humbling of something so advanced
accomplished through moving it outside its comfort zone.
Mendlesohn's praise for the ' immersive techniques' deployed in Excession
quoted above may be another aspect of the novel that suggests further questions. If
immersion in the texture and colour of the lives of the characters is something at
which Banks has excelled, then it might also be the case that immersion/emersion can
have a broader thematic significance within Banks' s novels in general and Excess ion
in particular. Jameson's claim for the importance of spatiality for sf points to the
significant political dimensions that accompany ' classic' sfs handling and coding of
interior and exterior space(s), and as I discuss below, Excession can be read as a rich
contemporary example of the intellectual fecundity of space-opera manipulations of
inside/outside. To follow the novel' s recurrent meditations on immersion and its
metaphoric power is also to place it within a political discourse on the relationship
between the writer and their political context, and the sometimes contradictory work
of a British critic and writer whose own foray into science fiction is commonly
regarded as deeply implicated in the politics of his time.
Inside the Whale
' Inside the Whale' is the title of a long essay by George Orwell that appeared
in 1940, and that for most of its length is a commentary on the work of the American
novelist Henry Miller whom Orwell met in Paris on his way to Spain to fight in the
Civil War. Orwell discusses Miller's use of the image of being inside the whale, and
adapts it to a description of finding oneself at a particular point in history inside a
mass social formation that one is powerless to control. Responding to existence
' inside the whale' , some writers will abandon themselves to the whale' s motion and
to the impersonal force of historical change and instead focus on the self in isolation
from its environment. Miller is just such a writer for Orwell but perhaps surprisingly
for someone with his political credentials, Orwell regards Miller's apparently quieti st
position as a comprehensible and in fact predictable reaction to Europe's seemingly
unstoppable descent into war. Raymond Williams in his book on Orwell (1971) has
grappled with the apparent contraction in Orwell 's thought about the writer's role in
relation to their political milieu, and connects 'Inside the Whale' to the apparent
pessimism of his dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four:
There is a clear line, certainly from ' Inside the Whale' and Nineteen Eighty
Four to an orthodox North Atlantic mood in which all humane and positive
beliefs, especially a belief in radical change, were recognised in advance either
as the projection of some personal or social maladjustment, or as an
inexperienced, naive, adolescent idealism[ ... ] (Williams 1971: 86)
Williams comes to the conclusion that antagonistic tendencies to promote change on
the one hand and to give up on the possibility of change on the other, in "generalised
swearing" (Williams 1971 : 89), can be found throughout the different phases of
Orwell 's writing career. It is interesting to speculate how far such contradictions
might be at work in the quite specific swearing about contemporary politics found in
mainstream works by Banks such as Dead Air and The Quarry, however that lies
outside the scope of this article. Orwell in the essay makes clear the upside to living
inside the whale, not caring about what goes outside:
For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike
thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to
escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It
is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big
enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly
fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an
attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. (Orwell 2000:
107)
There is a seductive quality about being inside the whale, about being held,
powerless, but perhaps protected, inside a larger structure away from the chaos
outside. Being incorporated into the whale is a return to the womb and a transition
into a comfortable cradling free from responsibilities.
The Culture novels have long been sensitive to the different aspects of
cradling and security provided to Culture citizens by the Minds in particular and
advanced technology, from the management of defence forces, energy sources and
Orbitals to the personal protection offered by soulsavers and knife missiles. Banks's
books also frequently focus on what we might term the somatic experience of being
enfolded, giving readers quite precise descriptions of what it feels like for a human
type character to be encased inside a protective suit, or submerged in a liquid
environment inside a fast-moving ship, to be covered or shielded by a machine, or
getting used to an living inside an unfamiliar body. The narratives often complement
the sense of protection with one of powerlessness, with human characters sometimes
experiencing what are in the context irrational but instinctive fears of suffocation or of
being crushed. The nefarious Colonel Agansu in the final Culture novel The
Hydrogen Sonata (2012) has a number of such experiences including connecting
himself to the digitized command centre of a spaceship while his body lies immobile,
and uploading a copy of his consciousness into a combat arbite (a kind of military
robot). The converse disorienting sensation of floating in a volume without structure,
as experienced by humans spending time living in a gas giant planet, is described as
"swim" in The Algebraist (2004) (see Kneale 2013: 59).
Upon finding themselves inside the huge whale, some people will abandon
themselves to this powerful vector, lie back, stop worrying and enjoy the ride. Others
will seek to understand their position inside the whale, and are interested in what lies
beyond its borders. If we are inclined to read the Culture as having potential to be a
comfortable leviathan of this kind, it is also important to notice how often the novels
focus on those at the fringes of the Culture, including Special Circumstances,
Eccentrics both organic and inorganic, exiles of different kinds, the Ulterior, etc.
Going back Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture books to be published (although
by no means the first to be written, as meticulous research by David Haddock, editor
of The Banksonian has shown) it seems apparent that as readers we actually started
'outside' the Culture, following the travails of a character we only gradually realise is
working for the wrong side. This playful misdirection shows how far the Culture is
presented to readers not as a permanently infallible good but as something to be
contested and argued over, something evinced by Excession's presentation of the
various protracted discussions between the Minds over how to respond to the
excession and to the Affront.
Outside the box
In her investigation of Excession, Mendlesohn contrasts Banks's Culture novels to the
capitalist frameworks of both earlier forms of space opera and Cyberpunk:
Banks refused to accept the inevitability of capitalism posited by Cyberpunk
and earlier space opera[ ... ] SF mostly reflects the social and economic mores
of the contemporary world - it is actually very difficult to think outside the
box - but in this one area, Banks simply disposed of the box. His space operas
take place in a postscarcity society which, while currently unavailable to us, is
perhaps the one vision that is still within our grasp [ ... ] (Mendlesohn 2005:
556-7)
Mendlesohn' s comments suggest that Banks has bypassed the tricky matter of how a
capitalist society like ours might develop into something like the Culture, and gone
straight to the postscarcity civilisation where money no longer exists. Her use of the
term 'to think outside the box ' is however replete with significance in relation to
Excession as the novel is preoccupied with attempts ' to think outside the box ' both at
the level of characters' experiences of their own frames of reference being challenged
and the novel's repeated recourse to spatiality and metaphors of containment to
explain how transformation occurs. The encounter with a powerful Other that is
beyond comprehension has been a key feature of sf for generations but Excession is
remarkable for the spatial quality of the action and its metaphoric dimensions. This is
evident in the book ' s description of the impact of the discovery of higher mathematics
or 'metamatics' on civilisations:
It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being
moderately happy in there because you knew no better and then discovering a
little hole in one comer of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger
into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a
greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you so that you stepped
out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found
yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests,
soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning,
breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real
story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of
the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the
first volume of the story. (Banks 1996: 138-9)
Like the colonial definition of an Outside Context Problem quoted above, Banks
again uses a long lyrical sentence, delaying the full stop but the mood is almost the
complete reverse of the previous painful disorientation experienced through contact
with the outside. Here, scientific pursuit of ' higher forms' of knowledge is
unmistakably coded as positive, conveying liberation, enlightenment and possibility.
The revelation of the world beyond the spatial dimensions of our immediate
perception is, as the novel's plotting confirms, the beginning of a new story.
Spatial enfolding has a particular history in science fiction and the genre's
interest in dimensions and space. Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novel Flatland: A
Romance of Many Dimensions (2010) is famous for introducing the concept of higher
dimensions. Its narrator, Square, is a two-dimensional entity living in a society of 2D
shapes who is visited in a dream by an entity called Sphere and told of another
dimension (Spaceland) in which 30 objects exist. Excession's detailed description of
hyperspace initially follows the template set out in Flatland:
The usual way to explain it was by analogy; this was how the idea was
introduced to you as a child. Imagine you were travelling through space and
you came to this planet which was very big and almost perfectly smooth and
on which there lived creatures who were composed of one layer of atoms; in
effect, two-dimensional. These creatures would be born, live and die like us
and they might well possess genuine intelligence. They would, initially, have
no idea or grasp of the third dimension, but they would be able to live
perfectly well in their two dimensions. To them, a line would be like a wall
across their world (or, from the end, it would look like a point). An unbroken
circle would be like a locked room. (Banks 1996: 269)
Thus far Banks follows Abbott's scenario, but then Banks reworks Flatland's plot
development so that instead of Abbott's narrative having Flatland's inhabitants visited
by 'higher powers' and inspired to think of a higher dimension, Banks's hypothetical
2D beings work out for themselves that they live in a 3D universe:
Perhaps, if they were able to build machines which allowed them to journey at
great speed along the surface of their planet - which to them would be their
universe - they would go right round the planet and come back to where they
had started from. More likely, they would be able to work this out from
theory. Either way, they would realise that their universe was both closed, and
curved, and that there was, in fact, a third dimension, even if they had no
practical access to it. Being familiar with the idea of circles, they would
probably christen the shape of their universe a 'hypercircle' rather than
inventing a new word. The three-dimensional people would, of course, call it a
sphere. (Banks 1996: 269)
Excession' s endorsement of this hopeful idea oflife-forms being able through science
to look beyond their own order of things, to theorise and speculate about the outside
context, is of course complicated by the fact that the visit of the Excession, while
uncommunicative, does share certain features with the angelic qualities of Abbott' s
Sphere.iii Abbott's series of different dimensions sequentially enclosing one other
(Spaceland, Flatland, Lineland, Pointland) may also be an ancestor of Banks' s
description in ' A Few Notes on the Culture' of how our understanding of spatiality
forms the basis for the Culture stories' use of higher dimensions:
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space
time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width
on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce
a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you
imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than
thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like an inflating beach-ball, for
example), think of an onion. (Banks l 994a, np)
This beguiling onion-model image of a series of higher dimensions folded inside one
another anticipates both the shellworld of Matter, with its concentric strata and
literalised 'spheres of influence ' and the multi verse of Transition (2009) through
which its characters travel (and which of course has its own horizons).
Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox's New Boundaries in Political Science
Fiction (2008) begins with a Preface entitled 'Inside and Out' in which the editors
reflect on their experience of airport security and control as an index of the political
conditions of their historical moment. Excess ion' s sustained exploration of inside and
out partakes of the politics of its moment and can be viewed in the light of Jameson's
analysis of how sf novels can manipulate
our sense of the dialectic of inside and outside, reducing this dialectic (which
might also have meant warmth and shelter, say, or miniature comforts after the
terror of infinite spaces) to an asphyxiated condition from which one must
escape at all costs. I would argue that the function of this kind of episode is
precisely to inflect our reading of space, and to program us (or cue us) to the
desired system of responses (in this case, emergence into the open is positive,
while the logic of the closed or the interior entails [psychological] shrinkage,
contraction and constraint). I am assuming then that there are no 'natural'
responses to or evaluations of space; that it is not nature, but culture and
history, which determine the reading of the inside/outside dialectic at any
given moment (but this is why, in a complex and sedimented historical culture
like our own, the writer has to have a formal freedom to nudge us this way
rather than that) (Jameson 2005: 309-10)
The dynamic, or in Jameson ' s terms the dialectic, between inside/outside, becomes in
Excess ion a complex series of higher dimensions folded into one another, so that a
civilisation may solve one set of problems but another outside context will appear,
setting off a new cycle of self-evaluation and waiting to be explored. This spatial
arrangement means that the Culture novels collectively avoid closure, which Jameson
sees as a recurrent problem in utopian sf, and instead Banks keeps "the great galactic
civilisational game" (Banks 1996: 87) on the road, avoiding the full stop. Space (and
spatiality) provide new outside contexts to be amazed by and Banks's use of the
expanding onion might be a useful image of how the different Culture novels work
collectively, that is not as a strictly linear sequence but as journeys into new contexts
and new problems, so that the most recent (and very sadly, the final) novel in the
series The Hydrogen Sonata is also about the beginnings of the Culture. Excession
does not stage an outside as a resource to be enjoyed as liberation, put rather posits it
as a horizon of possibility that may help us to understand our position inside the
whale a little better, to make its confines a little clearer and to imagine a different
future.
If Excession, to follow Jameson's model, tends through its complex use of
space and manipulation of sentence lengths to cue its readers to respond to exteriority
and openness in positive ways, it also important to acknowledge that to read the
Culture novels is not quite to encounter the preaching of a higher dimension of truth,
as happens in Abbott' s Flatland. Instead the people of the Culture, including ship
Minds, themselves become of aware their limited horizons, and the limitations of life
inside their whale. The failure of the Culture to persuade this emissary to have any
more do with it is significant, as the coda shows some Minds are correct in thinking
that the Excession believes the social orders it has observed are too undeveloped and
unstable to be directly communicated with. What is perhaps more significant is that at
least some Culture minds already suspect this inadequacy and are aware but not
necessarily complacent about how the encounter with the Excession has highlighted
their own imperfection.
If the earlier two quotes from Excession about higher dimensions are
remarkable for their sentence length, then Banks' s strategy of stretching sentences
beyond the usual dimensions reaches its culmination in the novel 's Epilogue. This
final unnumbered page of lower-case text appears to be a report by the Excession
itself, accounting for its actions and claiming that the events set in motion by its
appearance show 'a fundamental unreadiness' on the part of the Culture and its peers
to contact entities from higher dimensions. The sometimes cryptic stream-of
consciousness text, redolent of modernist experimentation but also of Feersum
Endjinn' s creative idiom, leaves commas and full stops behind completely and comes
up with its own aporia in its repeated use of ' [no translation] ', hinting at things
beyond the capacity of (this) language to represent. Banks's novel persistently
stimulates his readers to think about possibilities of higher dimensions, and to dream
of life outside the whale.
What is so typical of Banks's talent for space opera is his capacity to weave
together stories that take place at the level of a few individuals with narratives that
span the galaxy and encompass whole civilisations, and that talent to bridge different
scales is very much in evidence in Excession. It is a quintessentially Banksian move
for the civilisation-wide reflections on inside/outside and the potential dangers of
remaining content ' within the whale' that I have discussed above to be counterpointed
in the novel by a narrative of prolonged pregnancy culminating in that most
challenging and historically dangerous transition to an outside context, the birth of a
child. The journey from stasis, both in-utero and in the suspended animation tableaux
created by the Sleeper Service, to exploration in space and time is thus coded as a
positive development and rendered part of a human's rediscovery of hope for and
confidence in a future beyond the confines of the known. The full stops that signal the
end of a sentence, having been strategically delayed at key moments in the novel, are
in the Epilogue dispensed with entirely as the novel ends with rejection of, almost
amounting to a disbelief in, closure and finitude. The sadness we feel at Banks' s early
death and the premature end of the Culture series is testament to how much we have
enjoyed an extraordinary sequence of sf works that arrived it seemed, already formed,
already in a main sequence, but that grew and evolved in such fascinating ways
written by an author who brought an acute political perspective and stylistic brio to so
much he did. We may all be inside the whale but some of us are looking at the stars.
i 'A dialectical trope of sf is the notion of imperial expansion as the vehicle of escape: if empire begins by extending the reach of oppression, it ends by undermining it. A galactic empire has been a staple of sf since Asimov' s Foundation trilogy, and his Roman original and its parabolic trajectory has provided the template for many a tale of decline and fall, and of post-imperial diversity analogous to the rise of feudalism and capitalism in Europe. ' (McLeod 2003: 236-7) ii see SFX Magazine: 'Excession: A Conversation with Iain Banks' iii Banks' s "The Spheres" (2010) that was originally part of Transition (2009) plays with the idea of excession-like spheres visiting a society of Neanderthals.
Works cited
Abbott, Edwin A. 2010 Flatland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Banks, Iain M. 1987. Consider Phlebas. London: Orbit.
---- 1999. The Player of Games. London: Orbit. (first published 1988)
---- 1993. Against a Dark Background. London: Orbit.
---- 1994. Feersum Endjinn. London: Orbit.
---- 1994a. 'A Few Notes on the Culture'. www.rec.arts.sf.written.
http://www.vavatch.co. uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm (accessed 20 October
2013).
---- 1996. Excession. London: Orbit.
---- 2009. Transition. London: Little Brown.
---- 2010. 'The Spheres'. NOVACON 40. Birmigham: Birmingham Science Fiction
Group, pp. 6-27
---- 2013. The Hydrogen Sonata London: Orbit.
Blornkamp, Neill, dir. 2009. District 9
Brown, Chris. 2001. "'Special Circumstances': Intervention by a Liberal Utopia '.
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 30: 625-633.
Duggan, Robert. 2007. 'Iain M. Banks, Postmodemism and the Gulf War' .
Extrapolation 48.3 : 558-578.
---- 2013. ' The Geopolitics oflnner Space in Contemporary British Fiction' Textual
Practice 27.4: 899-920.
Haddock, David. 2013. The Banksonian. http://efanzines.com/Banksoniain/. Accessed
1 October 2013.
Hassler, Donald M. and Clyde Wilcox, eds. 2008. New Boundaries in Political
Science Fiction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Kerslake, Patricia. 2007. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press
Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, and James Heilman. 2008. 'Outside Context Problems:
Liberalism and the Other in the Work oflain M. Banks'. In New Boundaries in
Political Science Fiction. Eds. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press, pp. 235-258.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future London: Verso
Kneale, James. 2013. "'I have never been to Nasqueron": A Geographer Reads
Banks'. In The Transgressive lain Banks. Eds. Martyn Colebrook and Katharine
Cox. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 45-62.
McLeod, Ken. 2003. 'Politics and Science Fiction'. The Cambridge Companion to
Science Fiction. Eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 230-240.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2005. ' Iain M. Banks: Excession'. In A Companion to Science
Fiction. Ed. David Seed. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 556-566.
Orwell, George. 2000. 'Inside the Whale'. Complete Works Vol. 12 London: Secker
and Warburg, pp 86-115 (first published 1940)
SFX Magazine. 'Excession: A Conversation with Iain Banks' (interview originally
published in SFX magazine, via 'sandm.co.uk' website)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080206132746/http://www.sandm.co.uk/mary/sf
journm/Excession/excession.html. Accessed 1 October 2013.
Stephenson, William. 2013. '"Hippies with mega nukes": The Culture, Terror and the
War Machine'. In The Transgressive Jain Banks. Eds. Martyn Colebrook and
Katharine Cox. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 165-178
Warner, Marina. 1994. 'Cannibal Tales'. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the
reith-lectures-l 994-cannibal-tales-the-hunger-for-conquest-in-the-penultimate
lecture-in-her-series-entitled-managing-monsters-marina-wamer-asks-who-are
the-real-cannibals-1396094.htrnl. Accessed 1October2013.
Williams, Raymond. 1971. George Orwell. NY: Columbia University Press.